Question: What has been your biggest project?

Ivanka Brown answered on 14 Mar 2012:

I wonder what you mean by biggest.

I worked on the Crossrail project and by financials (£16bn) and geographical spread it is the largest I have worked on. My involvement was co-ordinating the additional ground investigations that were carried out after design had started. The designers of the tunnels and relief shafts found that there were gaps in the information on the ground. The boreholes were sometimes over 200m apart and if there was a fault (or even two) in between it would meant that the layers of soil in the ground could not be assumed to be the same (a picture would be so good to explain this!). So we had go find places in central London to dig more holes. This sometimes meant we had to close roads, bring an archeologist along and install instrumentation to find out how far the water table is below ground.

I also carried out a desk study for the London Cable Car project where I did research into what structures may be in the ground around Greenwich and the Royal Victoria Dock and any results from ground investigations that were carried out nearby. I think that may have been more prestigious.

On big projects you may be able to see that there are hundreds or even thousands of people working together to move to success completion.